PITTSFIELD, Mass. — There’s a reason great source material often makes bad musicals. The stronger the original, the more tenaciously it resists translation to another medium.

Still, successes like “My Fair Lady” and “Carousel,” to name two currently prominent counterexamples, keep tempting big talents to believe they can work the same magic.

I’m sorry to say that even after 20 years of work, the big talents behind “The Royal Family of Broadway” were unable to turn “The Royal Family” — the classic 1927 backstage comedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber — into a credible musical. The version finally getting its premiere at the Barrington Stage Company here is a hot, hectic mess.

Perhaps, like tough dough, it has been overworked. The original workshop in 1998, directed by Jerry Zaks after Tommy Tune dropped out, had a book by Richard Greenberg and starred Eileen Heckart as Fanny, the matriarch of an acting dynasty modeled on the Barrymores. Fanny’s diva daughter, Julia, was played by Donna Murphy, and her swashbuckling movie-star son, Tony, by Reg Rogers.

The constant throughout was William Finn, who wrote the music and lyrics. He must have felt he had something special within his grasp because even after the play’s copyright holders withdrew the adaptation rights (they were restored a decade later) he kept at it. Several of the songs already written for the show became familiar in cabaret settings, where they landed well, especially when caterwauled by Mr. Finn himself.

The current version, which closes on Saturday, has another new book, this one by Mr. Finn’s “25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” collaborator Rachel Sheinkin, incorporating elements of Mr. Greenberg’s adaptation. Like the original, it concerns the romantic entanglements of three members of the Cavendish clan, drawing contrasts between so-called normal life and the life of a family in thrall to the theater.

Much like John Barrymore, Tony (Will Swenson) transfers the exaggerated drama of his acting to his chaotic daily existence; as the play begins he is on the lam from a Polish screen siren and a possible murder charge. (He stabbed the director of his latest movie.)

The opposite problem confounds Julie (Laura Michelle Kelly) and her daughter, Gwen (Hayley Podschun): They want the stability of marriage without giving up the excitement of the stage. When Julie’s old lover, Gil, now a millionaire, returns from Brazil to scoop her up, and Gwen’s stockbroker fiancé, Perry, lays out his dream of a proper suburban life, both women dither over what to do.

Image

Will Swenson, center, singing “Too Much Drama in My Life” as the musical’s John Barrymore figure.CreditDaniel Rader

To grande dame Fanny (Harriet Harris), their doubts are ignoble. “Marriage isn’t a career,” she harrumphs. “It’s an incident!”

That sort of bon mot — along with huge dollops of bohemian atmosphere — were enough to make the nonmusical “Royal Family” a success. The 1930 movie adaptation starring the divine Ina Claire refined the formula, dropping Fanny’s untalented brother and sister-in-law, Bert and Kitty, and drawing out the melancholy beneath the frolic.

The musical restores Bert and Kitty (Arnie Burton and Kathryn Fitzgerald) as clowns and goes in another direction. Or really, in every direction. (The actual direction, by John Rando, can hardly be called that.) Forget melancholy; with way too much happening onstage at all times, there is only mania here.

That’s partly the result of a problem any adapters would have faced. Naturally, to give the material a reason to sing, the Cavendishes had to be made into musical theater royalty. But if they don’t perform Shakespeare or even Arthur Wing Pinero must they star in tawdry Jazz Age inanities like Julie’s (fictional) vehicle “Tickled Pink”? When planning to marry Gil, she even turns down a bauble called “Show Boat.”

Musically, Mr. Finn is quite adept at the pastiche this approach requires. The opening — in which we see Julie tapping with the chorus of “Tickled Pink” — is a neat minor key up-tempo number in the style of Irving Berlin. Tony’s establishing song, “Too Much Drama in My Life,” is a hearty operetta parody. And for Gwen and Perry (A.J. Shively), Mr. Finn provides a pleasant gloss on Jerome Kern in a dancey tune called “Baby Let’s Stroll.”

But why should Perry — who is more concerned about his mother’s tea party than Gwen’s career — be dancing? (The choreography, mostly charming, is by Joshua Bergasse.) And why should Julie’s stuffed-shirt millionaire (Alan H. Green, burdened with syrupy ballads) sing at all?

Hewing to the idea that everything important in a musical must be characterized in song, “The Royal Family of Broadway” quickly blurs the distinction between its theatrical and nontheatrical characters — and thus nullifies their conflict. It also turns the high-middlebrow Cavendishes into lowbrows, and Bert and Kitty, who in the original are merely “mediocre,” into mortifying no-talents. The snippet we see of their idiotic vanity project, “The Striking Viking,” aims so low it undershoots satire by a mile.

This across-the-board downgrading of the family’s talent and aspirations makes them seem not just pretentious but delusional. What grandeur are they bemoaning the loss of?

Mr. Finn’s scattershot lyrics don’t help: He lurches at rhymes regardless of fit, as if at a sample sale where they might run out. The staging and, to a lesser extent, the performances have a similar desperate edge.

Are there compensations? Yes. The costumes (by Alejo Vietti) and the orchestrations (by Bruce Coughlin) are delicious. Ms. Harris makes a vivid vaudevillian and Mr. Swenson is genetically incapable of not being dashing.

But it would have taken more wit and clarity to keep this material from drooping as a musical. When Cavendishes are Kramdens, what’s so royal?